Mississippi executes man convicted of raping, murdering student

PARCHMAN, Miss. (AP) — A Mississippi man convicted of kidnapping, raping and murdering a 20-year-old community college student in 1993 was executed Wednesday.

Charles Crawford, 59, was pronounced dead at 6:15 p.m. following a lethal injection at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman.

Crawford had spent more than 30 years on death row. His execution comes several months after that of Mississippi’s longest-serving death row inmate, during a year of escalating executions nationwide.

Crawford was convicted of kidnapping Kristy Ray from her parents’ home in Tippah County in northern Mississippi on January 29, 1993. According to court records, when Ray’s mother returned home, her daughter’s car was missing and a handwritten ransom note had been left on the table.

The same day, another ransom note, made from magazine clippings and for a woman named Jennifer, was found in the attic of Crawford’s former father-in-law. The note was turned over to law enforcement, who began searching for Crawford. He was arrested a day later and said he was returning from a hunting trip.

He later told authorities that he had lost consciousness and had no memory of Ray’s murder.

At the time of this arrest, Crawford was days away from his trial on another assault charge. The trial stemmed from a 1991 attack in which Crawford was accused of raping a 17-year-old girl and hitting her friend with a hammer.

Despite his claims that he had experienced blackouts and did not remember committing the rape or the hammer attack, Crawford was convicted of both charges in two separate trials.

His prior conviction for rape was considered an “aggravating factor” by jurors in Crawford’s capital murder trial, paving the way for his death sentence.

Over the past three decades, Crawford has unsuccessfully attempted to have his death sentence overturned.

In an order issued minutes before the execution was scheduled, the United States Supreme Court refused, without explanation, to stop the execution. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

His lawyers had appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that Crawford should be given a new trial because his Sixth Amendment rights were violated during his 1994 trial.

The appeal alleged that Crawford’s lawyers admitted his guilt in the capital murder trial and invoked the insanity defense over Crawford’s repeated objections. The argument draws on a 2018 Supreme Court ruling, which ordered a new trial for a death row inmate and established that a lawyer for a criminal defendant cannot override a client’s wish to maintain his or her innocence at trial.

“It’s almost as if he didn’t even get a chance to plead innocent or guilty because his attorney simply overrode his wishes from the start,” said Krissy Nobile, director of the Mississippi Office of Capital Post-Conviction Relief, who represented Crawford.

The Mississippi Supreme Court rejected the argument in September, writing that Crawford should have appealed sooner and failed to present adequate reasons why the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision should be retroactive.

After the Mississippi Supreme Court set his execution date for September, Nobile said Crawford expressed both disappointment and resolve.

Nobile characterized Crawford as a respected and uplifting presence on death row. She said he worked inside the prison and advocated on behalf of other inmates.

Marc McClure, the chief superintendent of operations for the Mississippi Department of Corrections, said at a news conference that Crawford visited him with his family and a preacher Wednesday afternoon.

The Associated Press made several attempts to contact Ray’s relatives, but received no response. Crawford also did not respond to requests for comment.

This lethal injection is the third in two days in the United States, after Tuesday’s executions in Florida and Missouri. Since the start of the year, a total of 38 men have died following court-ordered executions in the United States.

In Florida, Samuel Lee Smithers, 72, was executed for the 1996 murder of two women whose bodies were found in a rural pond. In Missouri, Lance Shockley was executed for fatally shooting a state trooper in 2005.

Six more executions are planned for 2025, the next being that of Richard Djerf, convicted of murdering four members of a family in Arizona more than 30 years ago.